1. Field
This disclosure generally relates to digital media. More particularly, the disclosure relates to digital media archiving.
2. General Background
The quantity and size of the digital media files utilized by consumers is rapidly increasing at an exponential rate. Many users are now storing vast amounts of digital media files such as images and video with higher resolutions and larger file sizes. With the decline of analog imaging, the digital form of the images and videos is increasingly the “original.” Further, the exponential increase in quantity means that, as a percentage, the chance of any piece of digital media having been output in physical form is becoming quite small. In addition, magnetic storage has reached the three TeraByte per device level and continues to increase at a fast pace. These trends have led to a situation in which users are storing an increasing quantity of digital media files on drives with increasing storage space. Further, the user is unlikely to back up those digital media files given the increasing quantity of digital media files. As a result, the chance of an error eventually developing with the digital media is currently larger than fifty percent. In addition, the profusion of devices that can capture, store, and process media provides increasing difficulty for users with respect to managing all of their files. Further, transferring files to the cloud is becoming more problematic as a result of bandwidth providers capping bandwidth usage. Therefore, archiving digital media files is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.
Many current archiving systems generally do not have capacity to prioritize files. The few systems that do have capacity typically utilize the same approaches that a hard drive data caching system may employ to improve access times. For example, these approaches rely on recency of access or a combination of recency of access and frequency of access to determine what data should be prioritized. As a result, a media archiving system may sort the files that were created most recently or most frequently for archiving. However, with respect to media files, such a media archiving system may assign the wrong files the highest priorities.
Other current approaches generally assume that all data should be archived. However, current data limit constraints on bandwidth imposed by broadband providers in both consumer and enterprise configurations simply make those approaches infeasible.